Paul Chadburn
This half-forgotten epic from the England of 1665 reminds us that heroism can be the prerogative of a whole civilian community. It also reminds us that courage is strengthened by conviction. In 1665 the villagers of Eyam in Derbyshire were visited by the bubonic plague. Rather than fleeing (and so probably spreading the plague) they chose another way.
August, 1665, and in the Derbyshire Peak village of Eyam great merrymaking. For it is the day of the wake, combined church and harvest festival. More than usual gaiety and more people from neighbouring villages and hamlets than in previous years. The times are prosperous. Below ground, the lead mines on which the community lives are being busily exploited; above ground, rich pastures are ripening to harvest. The little village, nestling in a fold half-way up the hills, is all jollification, young people dancing on the green, old folks sitting outside the inns, children – and the families are large in these days – laughing, chattering, whipping their tops and bowling their hoops along the streets.
There is George Vicars, the tailor, young enough yet to enjoy a fling with his landlady, the widow Cooper. Here, sitting over his ale, is farmer Mortins, his greyhound curled at his feet; here, too, is Merril, come from lonely Hollin’s House, his residence, to enjoy the life and company. The widow Kempe has walked over from Shepherds Flats. Her young family and the Mortins’s children are playing together. From the neighbouring village of Riley have come the numerous members of the Hancock and the Talbot families. With the three hundred and fifty inhabitants of Eyam intermingle their relatives, sweethearts, friends from all the district round.
Here it is at this annual wake that romances start, to be consummated, if all goes well, the year succeeding at the altar of Eyam church.
One of these romances is even now beginning; the housewives comment complacently upon it, as well they may – for it brings together two of the most handsome young people in the neighbourhood, the beautiful Emmot Sydall and Master Rowland, of Middleton Dale, a mile south-east of Eyam.
One other, especially, is noticeable in that gay gathering. Remarkable, as he paces among the gay throng, for two things – his great size and his coarse, boisterous ways. It is the village Samson, Marshall Howe. His son is with him, hardly less powerfully built than he. They are inseparable.
Standing rather aloof, watching the country dances, is the man who has the spiritual charge of Eyam, William Mompesson, the rector, a frail-looking man of middle height, with a sensitive, scholarly face. He has been little more than a year in this parish. Only twenty-seven, not long from Oxford, and with the memories still vivid in his mind of a chaplaincy with Sir George Savile and of the fashionable world his patron moved amongst, he looks on these simple villagers with a touch of urbane scorn for rustic manners. There is something faintly condescending, faintly bored in his expression, as if to say: “What have I, ambitious and intelligent, to do with this backward community, lost to the world, obscure below a lonely peak?”
But, looking at his companion, the expression vanishes from Mompesson’s face; for by his side, her arm linked through his, is a woman not only exceptionally beautiful, but with such gentleness in her face and such a charm and grace of manner as are seldom combined in one person. It is his wife, Catherine. A little girl of three and her brother, one year older, stand shyly attached to their mother’s skirts, awed by the rough gambols of their village contemporaries, at the same time itching to join in with them.
One other man of marked breeding looks on. He, too, wears the sober clothing of a minister. It is Thomas Stanley, the dissenting clergyman, once rector of Eyam, who has stayed on here, an outcast of the Oath of Conformity he would not take.
Such was the scene in Eyam in August of the year 1665, in a village isolated from urban life to an extent scarcely imaginable by modern minds. Twenty years of civil war, Scottish invasion, revolution, retribution; twenty years of tumult, change violence, of persecution, poverty and fear: years of catastrophe that had shaken London to its foundations, had left the village outposts high and dry, untouched, unmoved, unchanged. The Restoration, five years ago, had sometimes brought new vicars there, and that was all.
So with the crowning horror that had smitten Londoners the year before, the terrible visitation of bubonic plague. True, this had spread into the South and Midlands, all over the east coast, southwards into Surrey, Kent, but Eyam was a hundred and fifty miles northwards. Eyam was safe.
Yet even then, at that village wake, death – death in its most horrible apparel – the putrid, blackened, token-flecked plague corpse, was treading invisible its horrible counter-dance to the harvest hays. Of all these people there assembled to celebrate the festivities of life and fruition, a half were already marked for sudden, tortured destruction.
A few days afterwards, a servant of George Vicars, the tailor, opened a parcel that had arrived addressed to his master. It contained wares of the trade – various cloths. They had come from London. On taking them out, the servant found they were damp. So he put them to dry before the kitchen range. The steam rose from them as they hung before the fire. And with that steam, death. Death, latent in the cloth, exhaled, warmed to frightful virulence, reared and struck. The servant died in a few hours, marked all over his body with the ringed deathprick of the plague, the fatal “tokens”; every internal organ of his body distorted by poison.
But the first Eyam death was merciful compared with what was to come. This victim died swiftly. He died only once. Many of his followers underground – some into the tomb, more into the pits when death had outpaced the sexton – died a thousand times, in children, relatives and friends; when these were gone, in fears.
That month five other parishioners died. The plague had come to Eyam. Immediately this was known there happened on a small scale what, on a scale that has besmirched history, had already occurred in London. The wealthier inhabitants of Eyam fled. The two clergymen stayed: Mompesson, the new rector; Stanley, the old one.
The situation that was to develop in Eyam, an epical situation, contained a peculiar dramatic element. It had been noticeable in London, during the plague of the previous year, that proportionately more dissenting ministers than orthodox ones had stayed in the infected city, coming out into the open and appropriating pulpits craven conforming clergymen had vacated. These men had taken the opportunity to prove their faith. Mompesson, in Eyam, was on his mettle, for Stanley, the Nonconformist, was there to shame him if he flinched.
Mompesson stood up to the challenge, and if more is known of his heroic ministrations than of those of his colleague, this is because Mompesson was orthodox and orthodoxy was in sore need of heroes in those plague times.
Eyam’s rector was married. At the outbreak of the plague, his wife implored him to leave the parish. There were the two little children to be considered. Mompesson refused to go. “You leave with the children,” he replied, “but it is my duty to stay in Eyam.” His wife was worthy of him. The two little ones were sent away to safety, but Catherine Mompesson stayed at her husband’s side.
From the kitchen of the tailor’s house, where it had diffused through the room, the plague virus floated, hovered and fell upon the village of Eyam; it sent its invisible tendrils creeping this way and that; it buried into and impregnated the soil. Silently it struck household after household. The next month, October, the number of victims quadrupled – twenty-three deaths from plague were marked in the parish register. Where one of the family was taken, the rest generally followed. There was no combating it; for Eyam was without a doctor, without science. Concoctions were brewed of roots of herbs, simples of all kinds; talismans were worn. All useless. There seemed only one thing to do – to fly and scatter over the countryside, for each family to fend for itself, to stay with relatives in neighbouring villages, or at lodgings taken in the towns. They prepared to make off and leave Eyam a desolate, poisoned village.
That was the resolution of the flock; but it was not the will of the two pastors. Whether they first acted separately or in concert, by which the decision was first made, we do not know. It does not greatly matter. What does matter is, both came to realize that for many of the villagers there could now be no escape, for they must be smitten without knowing it. They would succumb after they had left Eyam, but, what was even more dreadful, they would communicate the plague wherever they went, spreading death about a district that, save for the village or doom, was free of it. There were about three hundred and fifty dwellers in that village; but who could estimate how many thousands they might infect outside it?
It was then that the young rector, he who had been slightly scornful of his parish before, who had stood aloof, conscious of a barrier dividing his cultured and fastidious mind from the unlettered stock of the Peak, it was then Mompesson found himself and his mission. At the same time that he saw the duty binding him, the rector, to his parishioners, he clearly understood the grim duty that bound the inhabitants to their village.
The task before the ministers now was to persuade the terrified people to remain in their doomed village. They appealed to the honour of the parishioners, to the duty they owed humanity, to the dignity inherent in man by which he will suffer martyrdom for a worthy cause. How would they be accountable to God, who worked His designs in terrible ways for inscrutable purposes, if, knowing the certain effect of flight, they yet persisted in this destructive urge?
How many impassioned exhortations were needed to convince the people records do not tell. But that one or both of the ministers must have been inspired with more than ordinary eloquence to overcome impulses than which there are no stronger – love of life, fear of lurking death in confined spaces – is certain. Much may have been effected by the appeal to individual choice. In London the same method of confining the sick and sound together had been officially enforced. A household with one stricken member was locked there in the poisoned dwelling until forty days had elapsed without fresh infection. Guards were below the windows, fires were burning in the street, and on the blighted doors the red plague cross and the legend: “Lord have mercy upon us!”
Because, in London, there had been no question of voluntary sacrifice, the people had not submitted. They had cheated the authorities and made their escapes in divers ways – some not notifying plague in their house, leaving the doomed inmates to die and themselves carrying the virus far and wide; some breaking and burrowing out like nailed-in rats.
There had been no persuading the London poor to their death – only dragooning them to it, and that with results more direful to the populace by far than properly organized segregation of suspects would have been.
The inhabitants of Eyam were free to choose. If, in the light of modern science, the alternatives put before them – likely annihilation of the few of Eyam or certain death among the many of Derbyshire – were not exhaustive and exclusive of other possibilities, the lesson of Eyam remains, and the eternal truth – that men will sacrifice themselves, nay, their wives and their families, for a cause they believe to be good; forced, they will succumb to all the instincts of the animal.
The villagers of Eyam remained. Of its own free will the community resolved to isolate itself. A boundary was drawn half a mile round Eyam, a line marked out by various landmarks – rocks, brooks, coppices and the like. Beyond this, no Eyam inhabitant was to go – none ever did go. Within this bourne, from outside, any “foreigner” came at his risk. It was indeed the bourne from which few travellers, very few, could hope to return.
There commenced the historic siege of Eyam – strange, inverted siege, where the enemy must at all costs be kept, not out, but in. From outside, relief did come – by Mompesson’s arrangement with the Earl of Devonshire, living nearby at Chatsworth, stores were sent out and left beside the boundary line – inside there was no respite from the silent enemy. The hopes that winter’s onset would furnish an ally in biting and purifying cold were dashed by the December toll. After November’s sudden drop in plague mortality – a drop from twenty-three deaths to seven – the Christmas month showed the dread foe resurgent – nine deaths. By then, altogether, forty-five plague-stricken villagers had been put in the churchyard, their tombs a melancholy prognostic for awed parishioners filing to Christmas service. How many more of them, they must have asked themselves, would lie underground when summer’s return touched the branches of the churchyard limes into verdant life?
The villagers, men, women, children, puffed pipes interminably, inhaling with the smoke a faint hope that tobacco would keep the virus at bay. They took copious draughts of herb tea. Some fled the village and, still inside the half-mile radius, built themselves huts and lived in isolation from their fellows. Vain measure, for the plague was in the very earth, seething up as the warm sun struck upon it.
There was nothing to do but wait, wait and pray. Little distraction from dread was afforded by tending the sick, for these for the most part died quickly. The most that could be done for many was closing their eyes. The plague often left its victims staring horribly.
The street of the village in plague time was like a vista deep in Dante’s hells; re-echoing with raging cries of the agonized victims or sounding with the wailings of mothers bereaved. Corpses – coffins there was no time to make – were daily trundled away. Sometimes you would hear a sudden commotion in a house as of a violent struggle, then doors would slam and there would issue into the street, half-clothed, or naked even, a victim driven mad by the racking headpains of the plague, dashing his skull against walls, falling stupefied beside the way.
Or a man, a moment before perfectly active, would suddenly become comatose and, sitting on a doorstep, fall into the dreaded sleep, prelude to plague death.
You would see mothers darting into the street to drag off a child from its playmates, vainly hoping to snatch it away from a contamination that was everywhere. One villager, talking to another, might be the first to see that his friend was stricken, notice a bubonic swelling behind the ear, or the “token” on his cheek. Stare and convey the sentence in his face.
So passed the winter in Eyam, month after month adding to the plague mortality – forty-five, fifty, fifty-eight, sixty-four, seventy-three, seventy-seven. And now June had come: a leafy, lovers’ month that the poor people of Eyam dreaded more than all the winter ones together. The finer the weather the fiercer the plague.
There were nineteen deaths in June. By now there was no more burying in the churchyard, and in the church no services for the quick or the dead. Lest proximity in worship should spread contagion, the congregation left their consecrated building for the open air. Services were held in a grassy dell under the vaulting of the sky, the worshippers scattered apart from one another, the preacher, for his pulpit, standing in the natural arch of a rock, known to this day as Cucklett Church. There Mompesson, frail and resolute amidst the June riot of unheeding nature, instilled hope and courage into the sad hearts of the people. Perhaps never before, never since, has there been a congregation who, together, singly, so needed consolation. There cannot have been one worshipper there who had not during the last half-year lost friends, relations, or family. For in that little village community the greater part was inter-related and each was well known to all.
London held Hell’s Carnival amidst the plague-eroded structures of religion and morality. Eyam was upstayed by its two preachers. The fierce passions and warped instincts, the gossip and slander, brutality and lust and greed that are often so highly concentrated in village communities were supplanted in Eyam – and many villagers must have thought divinely punished there – by the far more dreadful ravages of the plague.
If they had not had this religious conviction, those doomed villagers could never have been induced to immure themselves in a village that was to all intents and purposes a plague-house.
One character there was, though, whose coarse, nervous fibre was as resistant to the horror as his iron constitution had been to the thong itself of the plague. This was that village Samson mentioned before, boisterous, devil-may-care Marshall Howe. He was the man who now undertook the grim work of bearing off the plague victims and heaving them into the pits. He had no fear of infection, first because he had no fear of anything, and second, because he had himself been one of the first the plague had attacked and believed, erroneously, that this made him immune. He would enter the house of death, carry off the victim, joke and guffaw as he passed along the street with his ghastly burden, and, when he returned – perhaps for more – to scare those who needed no scaring, he recounted how he saw Old Nick grinning on the ivied rock as he returned from burying this or that villager in the dell. He boasted how, with his wages – the household relics of the dead he buried – he had “pinners and napkins enough to kindle his pipe with while he lived.” Long afterwards this man was a legend in Eyam, and mothers bothered by fractious children would threaten them with Marshall Howe as with a bogy man.
But to Marshall Howe came a saddening and a sobering blow. For one day, on returning home from his macabre business, he found his only son, inheritor of Howe’s huge frame and iron constitution, at grips with the invisible enemy. Despite all the father’s care, despite his magnificent physique, the son succumbed. From the time when the gigantic corpse-carrier buried his own son in the pits, that last ministration was performed by Marshall Howe with proper awe.
Still the deaths from plague rose as the summer advanced – July fifty-six deaths, August seventy-seven. The plague was at its height. One year had passed since the ironic festivities at Eyam.
What had become now of that ardent couple who had danced together on the green, Emmot Sydall and her lover Rowland? A tragedy that still lingers in legend had separated them. After the outbreak of the plague, Rowland, who lived a mile away from Eyam, had constantly visited his betrothed and her family, her father, mother and four young sisters. The two planned to marry at next year’s wake, hoping with desperate hope that the pestilent cloud would then have lifted from Eyam. Then came June and the terrible increase in plague mortality; then came the action of Stanley and Mompesson, encircling the village with a half-mile radius, cutting it off from the outside world. The boundary line passed between Middleton Dale, where Rowland lived, and the cottage home of Emmot Sydall. The lovers could not meet. Rowland, so legend relates, used to climb to a height that overlooked the forbidden plague village. There he would scan the street for a far sight of his Emmot. He did not see her. It was many months before he trod the familiar path to the Sydalls’ cottage again; the plague had yet a long course to run, slaying, sundering, annihilating entire families, before Rowland, on the threshold of her dwelling, was to know the answer to his torturing question: Dead is she, too, or is there a God in heaven?
What of those others who had danced on Eyam’s green? What of the Mortins family, the Kempe family, whose children had played so happily together? In a lonely hut on the hillside, Mortins is living still, living with no other company than four cows and his greyhound – with these and the ghosts of his dead family. His children, playing with those of the widow Kempe, had brought the plague into Mortins’s homestead, Shepherds Flats. One by one his family had been taken, till there remained only his wife and one other child still unborn. Then his wife was infected; the pains and the fever brought on premature labour. No woman help was available and Mortins himself assisted at the birth; Mortins himself immediately afterwards performed the last rites on the last two of his family. Then he went away to the hillside, a hermit with his memories.
Merril still lives, though severed from all intercourse with his fellows. Tradition tells his only companion is a cock.
At Riley, the Talbot and Hancock families, so prolific in children, have been wiped out – their graves are to be seen today – all exterminated except one, as if the demon of plague had wished to inscribe his exploit there on one living memory. Mrs. Hancock lost her husband, her children, and with her own hands buried them. She saw all her neighbours, the Talbots, transformed in those few lethal months from healthy to madly suffering human beings, from that to corpses.
These specific cases are among the few recorded ones of the plague at Eyam. Many that must have been as terrible have left no mark in history. There is one other tragedy, though, that cannot be omitted. All through these months Mompesson and Catherine his wife, absorbed in consoling the sick and the bereaved, had thought little of their own danger. One precaution Mrs Mompesson had taken: she had made an incision in her husband’s leg and, keeping it open, had hoped in this way to preserve a vent for the pestilence’s escape should it ever visit Mompesson.
One day she saw issuing from the wound a greenish ichor. Supposing this to be the plague leaving her husband’s body, she congratulated him joyfully, without one fear for herself, who, if that green issue were indeed the plague, was now almost certainly marked as the enemy’s next victim.
Mompesson himself was not convinced. He believed the issue was an ointment he had used as dressing. That incident did not make him believe his wife was doomed. Shortly afterwards he received an intimation that did make him tremble for her. Towards the middle of August, when the plague darts were striking down victims daily, he was walking with his wife through the fields behind the rectory. The day was so still and bright, there seemed such a benign spirit in nature that Catherine Mompesson was more cheerful than usual, as though she had received a hint of the plague’s approaching cessation, of a calm that must succeed its fiercest rage. “How sweet the air smells,” she said, filling her lungs deep.
Mompesson started, then looked away. He did not wish his wife to see the apprehension on his face. For that seemingly innocent remark of hers, expressing her brave gratitude for God’s smallest blessing in the time of his most terrible visitation, even that remark betrayed infection – there was plague in his wife’s nostrils. For the rector knew what she did not know – it had been a common observation that “the plague smells sweet, like ripe apples.”
When he had mastered his emotion, Mompesson examined his wife’s features for any confirmation of his dreadful surmise. There was no taint upon her flesh, she was beautiful as ever, with that ethereal quality one could not associate with the hideous physical distortions of the plague. But, looking at her, he could not but remember that this very fairylike frailty was itself partly due to another disease. His wife had for some time suffered from consumption, an ally – how refined an ally – to the brute plague.
On getting home, the worst happened. Catherine discovered death’s fingerprints on her skin. She begged her husband not to nurse her, at all costs to keep himself whole for his supreme duty of consoling and fortifying the few remaining souls of his parish. But this Mompesson would not do. He stayed with his wife to the end, watching the plague’s loathsome transformation of body’s beauty into a twisted and discoloured corpse.
He buried her; in his wrought state with the one consolation that he must soon follow her through the same nightmare portal.
In this belief, he wrote two letters, one to his little children, recording his grief at their mother’s tragic death, setting on record her rare moral excellence and devotion; the other to his former patron, Sir George Savile, such a letter as might have been penned by one of the last few survivors of a doomed ship and sent drifting in a bottle to add its page to the history of human tragedy. He wrote that scarcely one-sixth of the villagers remained, that there was little likelihood now of anyone’s escape.
But in this surmise Mompesson was wrong. Even as he wrote, the virulence had passed its murderous meridian. There had been seventy-two victims in August, September’s death-roll showed twenty-four – a terrible enough percentage, considering the decimated population.
October’s record showed fourteen deaths. And then, after the eleventh day of that month, with but a scattering of human beings left to slay, the plague stayed its hand in Eyam. There is no death recorded after October 11.
For many days the villagers remained in a dazed condition, fearing to hope. They continued trudging across to the half-mile limit, stopping on the Eyam side of that well that is still called Mompesson’s Well, bearing away their provisions, casting payment into the water for disinfection. If they met a purveyor on the far side, “No,” they would answer the query, “not yet – not another death – we are in God’s hands – the Lord have mercy on us!”
The change from fear to hope, the last look behind before setting their wills to living afresh that old life they had known before the lethal interlude that death had played them, is expressed for the villagers of Eyam in the third extant letter of their rector:
“The condition of this place has been so sad that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example. Our town has become a Golgotha, the place of a skull. My ears have never heard such doleful lamentations – my nose never smelled such horrid smells, and my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles. Here have been seventy-six families visited within my parish, out of which two hundred and fifty-nine persons died. Now (blessed be God) all our fears are over, for none have died of the plague since the eleventh of October, and the pest houses have been long empty. During this dreadful visitation I have not had the least symptom of disease, nor had I ever better health. My man had the distemper, and upon the appearance of the tumor I gave him some chemical antidotes, which operated, and after the rising broke he was very well. My maid continued in health, which was a blessing; for had she quailed, I should have been ill-set to have washed and gotten my provisions.”
A tale is told in Eyam of how one of the hermits of the epidemic, Merril of Hollin’s House, was apprised of the plague’s cessation. One day, soon after October 11, the cock – his sole companion – left him and made its way back to the village. Taking this as an omen, and recalling Noah’s dove, Merril took his courage in his hands and entered the village he had left a year before, missing many there he had known then, but finding, indeed, that the plague had gone.
About the same time another exile returned. Rowland, who for months had been chafing in Middleton Dale, hoping against hope, wondering if rumours he had heard were true, at last crossed the boundary and approached the native village of Emmot Sydall. Eyam was unrecognizable. Much familiar to Rowland in the old jaunty days of his courtship had gone. The street was quiet, almost deserted. In the faces of the few loiterers there was a look it was not good for any man to see, a look that told of experiences that could not come again, of nerves inured to horror, of deadened sensibilities that would never fully vibrate again to sorrow or gladness. To add to the melancholy effect, these people were scarcely clothed. They wore the barest necessaries of decent covering. Everything else had been burnt to destroy infection. Looking in at cottage windows, he saw bare rooms, all but essential furnishing destroyed. The few children he saw were unfamiliar to him. They were others of the same name he had known, carefree, sportive children. These poor creatures were scared-eyed, prematurely old. Of the dogs that had frisked round him as he strode toward the Sydalls’ home, of the basking cats that had blinked lazily from the window-ledges, he noticed none. All destroyed as possible plague-carriers. Instead, ravages of rats, mice, rabbits. Much there was that Rowland found depleted, everything, in fact, save the riot of vermin and there, under the brilliant foliage of the lime trees, the swelled churchyard earth, teeming with Eyam’s recent dead. If he stopped to look for her name there, he did not find it. But knowing what he did of the charnel pits, he would not have hoped overmuch from that omission.
Rowland opened the wicket of the Sydalls’ home, pushed through the rank confusion of weed and garden shrub. No one answered his knock. At his touch the door groaned open on its rusty hinges. He saw the familiar dresser in the kitchen, the crockery on which he had so often shared his meals with the family, ranged there in the old order. On the table, in the disorder of a meal not cleared away, were other dishes. Approaching, he found the plates and the spoons quite clean. Yes, a meal had been eaten there; but long ago – and it had been finished by rats. Someone had died in that house alone. Weeks since. There was no need to look at the table, to search through the house; weeds were pushing through the tiles of the floor.
The plague had killed all the Sydalls. The last left had been the mother and Emmot. Then Emmot sickened. The ring Rowland had given her was not on her finger when the plague-sexton bore her away to the pits. That her mother had slipped from her hand rather than let the yet unrepentant carrier filch it for his fee. Vain hope, for next came the mother’s turn, and the plague, vicariously, by its macabre minister, stole away even this, the symbol of a troth it had already robbed of fulfilment on this earth.
So ended Eyam’s heroic resistance to the unseen enemy. God knows what consolation the villagers took from their ultimate victory, from the thought that they had kept that ravening pestilence in, gripped it to their bosoms, wrestled with the demon of death to stop it desolating Derbyshire from end to end; their destitution, so many deaths among their nearest and dearest, must have checked all exultation of duty nobly carried through.
Whether or not Mompesson’s and Stanley’s order was scientifically the best, the heroism of the two ministers and the people of Eyam will live for ever among the epics of the world.